Guy Tillim's photography is fast cementing its status as 'oeuvre'. Implicit in the term is a narrative of progress and perfection, affirmed by Cape Times critic Melvyn Minaar calling Tillim's latest exhibition at Michael Stevenson his most sensitive work to date.

In a recent interview, Tillim talked about the kinds of choices he makes as being 'outside of the spectacular framing of photojournalism'. The photographs of Petros Village (simply entitled 'Petros Village, Malawi, 2006'), a remote but not completely isolated village in Malawi, were commissioned by the Rome Photo Festival, and funded by an NGO called the Santa Gidio Community. As they are involved in food and irrigation programmes in the area they'd wanted a story about famine. Tillim explained that he did not want to do a survey of rural poverty and he showed me stereotypical images a fellow photographer had taken in a neighbouring village: crying women, coffins, sick children. Tillim revealed a sensitive and subtle understanding of the gap between image and socio-economic reality: 'The communities require very specific engagement, such as irrigation or subsidised fertiliser. There is no point in drowning them in aid'.

Needless to say, the NGO had not been happy with the results. They were too aesthetic for the purposes of advocacy.A lot of people express discomfort with Tillim's work. Why do we need another white photographer taking photographs of poor Africans, selling these for close to R20 000 a print? For different ethical reasons both criticisms of Tillim's work are directed at the same thing. Guy Tillim's photographs are, to quote Ed Young, just too 'fucking gorgeous'.

What defines the images of Petros Village is a new tension between the stillness and movement, in both space and time.

In almost every photograph, a (usually) diagonal line directs the eye across and out of the picture plane: ropes attached to animals moving out of the frame, a bicycle lying on the ground, taut string, a loose rope on the ground, a bicycle upright against the wall of the house, smoke rising. The sequence of the outdoor photographs is arranged, whether by curatorial or photographer's decision, in order to create a sense of movement of the camera around the small houses, but also of the eye out of the frame and around the room. On one wall the half figure of a man exits bottom left of the frame, directing the eye to the adjacent wall where three photographs hang. Aside from the digital flatness of planes, it is Tillim's irreal colour that has become his signature for me. A contrast is set up during the printing process between the red brown of the ground and the almost electric blue green of the foliage. In the first photo the ratio is two thirds red earth to a third blue green with an arc suggesting movement leading up and out of the frame. In the next the ratio is almost equal halves of earth and green, and finally the sequence ends with two thirds green, one third ground.

My two favourite photographs, one of trees and shadows and the other of two girls' feet exiting the frame at opposite ends of an earthen hop-scotch grid, contain a similar tension between movement and stasis within them. They index a before and after, as well as the spaces that necessarily remain outside of the frame. This element of narrative, of movement in time and space is a refinement of Tillim's subtle sense of the transitional in his photographs of changing landscapes and social spaces in war-torn DRC, Angola and downtown Jo'burg. It is his sense of this tension between the photographic moment and the narrative that it excludes that defines his 'oeuvre'.

It is that these photographs of the outside frame those portraits taken inside, that the narrative tells a particularly Modernist photographic story. The logic of movement of the eye around the room, and finally, inside licenses the photographic eye to move from outside to inside, to enter the interior from the exterior, to penetrate the surface. As such these portraits, also defined by a tension, whether between the couples or the pose and its unnaturalness, are overwritten with a legibility of expression, gesture and gaze. We seem to be given privileged access to the years of suffering of an older couple, juxtaposed with the reserved, dignified smile of an older woman, Neri James, who looks a little down and to the side, her headscarf a rich red.

The contract between Modernist photography and the viewer is that the subjective choices of the photographer qualify the objectivity of the work because they are based on merely formal criteria. It is what has been called Tillim's 'quiet authorship' that is disturbing about these photographs. As such they follow the story he told me of the way he set up his photographs of inner city Johannesburg. Tillim lived in a flat in the city for several months. He used a translator, who still calls Michael Stevenson for a 'cut' of the commission. He explains that you had to wait before taking the photo, build up some kind of familiarity with people, not so much so that they knew you, but so that they forgot you were there. This could take days, even weeks. Suddenly a situation would develop in front of you, and you'd sort of disappear so as to capture it.

If Tillim's photographs are 'fucking gorgeous', then we are complicit in seeing what he sees when we look at them.

Bettina Malcomess is a lecturer in Theory and Discourse of Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Stellenbosch Academy of Graphic Design and Photography. Closed: June 3

Michael Stevenson Contemporary Gallery
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Green Point
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Fax: (021) 421 2578
www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pmp>